I just finished reading The quickest and easiest “Getting Started w/ GitHub” article you’ll ever read!. While it's a good place to start I think using GitExtensions hurts beginners more then it helps. Call me a purest but I think you should learn the commands first and then add tools to help simplify the process. I also think his assumption of 'What 80% of People Do On GitHub' is a bit off. Maybe I'm wrong...

In 2012 I resolve to:
Present at a conference (Pycon/Djangocon?)
Do a new project every month
Learn iOS
Lower body fat percentage to 10% or less
Get back into a climbing rhythm
Take Tiffany on more dates
Find a home in Boulder
Come up with 3 or 4 solid beer recipes
Enter homebrews into competition
Read one non-technical book a month
Maintain a blog, write a couple times a month
Minimalize my life

Now we should have this file/folder structure: . |-- .gitignore |-- README |-- _config.yml |-- _layouts | |-- layout.html | `-- post.html |-- _posts | `-- 1985-10-26-Test-Post.md `-- index.html Lets take a look at what each of these do. .gitignore This file is not manditory for a proper Jekyll install, but is useful if you are like me and use a mac (ignore the DS_Store) or emacs (ignore the autosave files). If you have any...

If you're interested in Jekyll and dont know where to start this is your guide. I will be walking you through everything you need from setting up an environment to deploying your page via GitHub Pages. Today we will be setting up a working environment for local development. Lets start with some background. Jekyll is a simple static website generator used for blogging. It was created by the cofounder of GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner (mojombo on...

Zach Holman created a nifty jQuery plugin so you can 'trawl Twitter for people linking to you' called Boastful. I use and love it, but it was missing Web Intents so I added them. Take a look at, Clone, Copy and Fork the code and let me know what you think.

Portability Jekyll utilizes Markdown and RST formats. This will come in handy when you take all your blog posts and make them into a book. Backups (Via GitHub) Using GitHub for managing your jekyll blog is only natural. It's where Jekyll came from after all (see GitPages). You can even host your blog straight off of GitPages. Speed Jekyll renders your site into static HTML pages. This site (static) loads much much faster then my...

Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again? -A. A. Milne As a developer taking notes has been, by far, one of the most beneficial habits I've acquired. There have been so many occasions when having notes has saved my ass. Some times I'll needed to recall code or design decisions I had made and forgotten, or figure out accountability issues, or even just jot down a simple 'To Do' list for...

If you havent read Day 1 and Day 2 please do. DISCLAIMER I am not a physician or a physical trainer or anything remotely close to that. I do not condone anyone putting themselves through what I will be doing for the next 3 days and as such cannot be held responsible for the consequences of doing so. If you do choose to do something as foolish as this please consult a physician so (s)he...

If you havent read Day 1 please do. DISCLAIMER I am not a physician or a physical trainer or anything remotely close to that. I do not condone anyone putting themselves through what I will be doing for the next 3 days and as such cannot be held responsible for the consequences of doing so. If you do choose to do something as foolish as this please consult a physician so (s)he can talk you...

Diet fads come and go nearly as fast as the days do so I decided to create my own. Introducing the Red Bull and Beer diet. I still need to come up with a catchy name for it. From friday until monday I will not eat any food. Instead I will subsist on only Red Bull and Beer. Throughout this journey I will share stats with you. Stats like the amount of drinks I've had,...

Last night I finally bit the bullet and deleted over 50 contacts from my phone, instant messaging, email accounts, and digital profiles. This is something that I started doing last year and have been trying to make a yearly habit of doing. By removing all my useless and unmaintained contacts I am removing a giant black hole that sucks up tons of my time, causes distraction, and is constantly getting in the way of important...

Envy Labs just released Rails for Zombies. This site is meant to help you learn Ruby on Rails in a fun, interactive way. On its own I find it to be a bit too high level. That is, with out other suplemental materials used in conjunction there isn't much context in the way of what Ruby on Rails is, how it works, and how to create a project of you own. That being said, I...

I arrived home last night to my favorite sight, a box left by UPS. FedEx and DHL boxes are equally awesome. This one happened to be filled with the new Boxee Box. I've been looking for something besides cable TV to take up my viewing hours. After doing some research I had whittled my options down to either the Boxee Box or Western Digital's TV Live Hub. Both of these boxes are $199.99 and look...

Skinning your minecraft character is super simple. All you need to do is create a 64px by 32px image and you're good to go! Ok I'm lying, but its almost that easy. Minecraft will look at the image you create and use certain parts for the separate surfaces of your character. Lets look at how the image is laid out. As you can see the layout is super simple. Lets also take a look at...

I've been looking for a refurbished mac for development recently and found myself leaving the refurbished site window open in the background and constantly checking the page. What a waste of time. Solution: write a web scraper to do the work for me. Below is a super simple scraper I wrote up that looks at Apple's refurbished page and scrapes for search terms (e.g. Mac mini, iMac, etc.). If new computers are listed that match...

Postgres is a pretty good RDBMS. Its missing something though. Actually its missing a lot of things, but we're going to talk about upserts. No that's not a typo. An upsert is the intersection of an update and an insert. When used it will either update, if the record exists, or insert a new record. I think this should be built in, but sadly it is not. This can be fixed with plpgsql. Below is...

I just got through reading a couple post (post1, post2) by brandontreb and I have to say I can't disagree more. I think Posterous is making some ballsy, yet positive moves. In the first post brandon outlines his thoughts on the "harsh blog post" that Posterous posted to lure users away from Tumblr. This is just great marketing. Through careful word play they belittle Tumblr while building themselves up. They also discredit obvious features in...

Most Wordpress bots are easy to spot. They promise cheap drugs, or wang enlargement, or spurt out gibberish and its evident that it isn't a real comment. You have to be pretty dense to not separate real post from these bots. There are other bots that offer some sort of nondescript advice or encouragement. These are a bit harder to spot, but still usually pretty easily spotted. I approved a bot's comment a few days...

I recently needed to come up with a quick and easy and hopefully elegant way to keep incremental rotating backups of the code I was working on. After a little research and testing I came up with the following bash script. The magic in this is taking advantage of rsync’s link-dest option. The link-dest option allows you to specify a folder to hard link. This means that when you rsync it only pulls the difference...